I've been using Spree to build a new site for Backyard Produce (http://www.byproduce.com). Spree is a sopping cart engine for rails. It's highly customizable and seems to be a great fit so far. All the data from the old Drupal site will get migrated into Rails. Those scripts were fun to write :). I'm excited about the flexibility I'm going to get from switching frameworks.

When the farms are poisoned and the rivers stop flowing, when the tourists stop coming because the roads are ruined and because the twinkling of the night sky is replaced with a bright orange haze that hums and buzzes like a transformer about to blow, people will wonder "how did so much go so wrong in a state that used to lead the nation as a place to live and to work?"

What an incredible shame, both because of an obvious mistake that the Speaker was not willing to correct, and because of a traitor, who accepted a $60m tax credit slipped into another bill in order to affect her vote to protect the environment.

Fracking will come to North Carolina because of a mistake and because of deceit. Will we ever be able to get rid of it, or will we live with it as the accident and the disaster that it will always be?﻿

State Rep. Becky Carney, a Charlotte Democrat, hit the wrong button when voting on Gov. Bev Perdue's veto of a bill establishing the framework for a controversial natural gas drilling process known as...

Delaware authorized online gambling today, as the state Senate approved a bill by a 14-6 vote to allow online betting in the state. The bill narrowly passed the required three-fifths majority. The mea...

Here, Eric Schmidt, has a great take on modern elections. It will be fun to see what campaign strategies politicians will use in future elections. The only problem I have with this stuff is that it always comes off so spammy.

After eighteen months, with more than $1 Billion of revenue, 4600 employees, 5000 locations and a million volunteers, everyone loses their jobs while celebrating, if they win. Political campaigns have always been full of energy, young people and passion, and none more than the Chicago reelection campaign of President Obama. Friends from the 2008 election returned to form and run the campaign, and I had a chance to see our system, up and close.

Ohio is mythical in political circles for its impact on the national elections, and all the monte-carlo simulations showed that Ohio would be the state to get to 270 votes. An early decision by Jim Messina, the campaign manager, to invest in Ohio and build a huge field operation paid off as Ohio put Obama over the top.

The Obama team organized the most effective get out the vote program in our nations history. It begins with a file of registered voters from the state registrar, in computerized form, and a set of analytics give that voter a score. People who are likely to support the candidate but have intermittent voting history get a lot of attention, up to six personal visits, to encourage them to turn out on election day and what can only be described as carpet-bombing of their television sets with political ads. Social media was used heavily, both advertising and “awareness”, where its much more interactive nature allowed very targeted messages from friends and politicians alike.

The analytics use a few dozen features, from commercial databases as well as information volunteered by the voter in a visit in person or online. The analytics also give each state a shape of voters based on turnout, and a prediction of the outcome many months before the actual election. On election day, the senior team compared the model to the real time turnout, and dynamically reassigned resources (people and ads) to the areas in the swing states needed. Politlcal experts told me that this was the really new thing this year in US politics.

The campaign built a near perfect cloud-based system for fundraising, voter turnout, and organizing. The scale of the final day is impressive and impossible to fully test. Modern cloud based data and programs scaled with the load seamlessly, and the same software used in many of the other web services we all used raised and spent money, managed a very large phone bank of volunteers, and gave immediate updates for tracking turnout, organizers and the final push. Cloud computing has arrived in US politics.

When I think about the 2016 race, or the 2014 mid-terms, I imagine a next generation of all these tactics as part of our election process. The big news will certainly be the ubiquity of smart phones (more than 50% already in the US and climbing fast) and we should expect a huge mobile applications push to entertain, communicate and eventually get the citizen to register and vote.

Even by startup work standards, conditions were tough. Every person in the campaign signed on to a relatively low salary, and impossibly long hours without a break (thirteen hour days, seven days a week, for months by my count.) I’m sure that the Romney campaign was filled with equivalenty hard working and sincere personnel. Here’s a salute to both teams, who jointly make our country a better place and worked so very hard for so long. The people in both campaigns worked tirelessly for the principles each believe in, and we need more people like them. Thank you all.

Due to bad weather off the North Carolina Coast, NASA has postponed the scheduled Sunday launch of the IRVE-3 hypersonic sounding rocket inflatable heat shield technology test from the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The next attempt may be as early as Monday, if weather conditions improve. For a good mission overview and background on IRVE-3, check out our pre-launch mission story --﻿